Securing Your WiFi

Your WiFi network holds private information that is meant to be accessed solely by you. With network hacking at an all time high, this confidential data may not be as private as you would like. Follow these steps to ensure your network is secure.

1. Access your routers settings page

First, you need to know how to access your wireless router’s settings. Usually you can do this by typing in “192.168.1.1” into your web browser, and then enter the correct user name and password for the router. This is different for each router, so first check your router’s user manual.

2. Change the login information to your router

Once you have logged into your router, the first thing you should do to secure your network is to change the default password of the router to something more secure.

This will prevent others from accessing the router and you can easily maintain the security settings that you want. You can change the password from the Administration settings on your router’s settings page. The default values are generally admin / password.

3. Change the SSID

The SSID (or Wireless Network Name) of your Wireless Router is usually pre-defined the brand name of the router (e.g., linksys). Although this will not make your network inherently more secure, changing the SSID name of your network is a good idea as it will make it more obvious for others to know which network they are connecting to.

This setting is usually under the basic wireless settings in your router’s settings page. Once this is set, you will always be sure that you are connecting to the correct Wireless network even if there are multiple wireless networks in your area.

4. Ensure there is a password on your network

In order to prevent other computers in the area from using your internet connection, you need to encrypt your wireless signals. There are several encryption methods for wireless settings, including WEP, WPA (WPA-Personal), and WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access version 2). WEP has been known to be crackable and is no longer considered secure. To enable encryption on your Wireless network, open the wireless security settings on your router’s configuration page. Enter a passphrase to access the network; make sure to set this to something that would be difficult for others to guess, and consider using a combination of letters, numbers, and special characters in the passphrase.